The part of Pauloff's corps, eight battalions, which preceded the rest had meanwhile crossed the head of the Quarry ravine, and, picking up the stray battalion of Soimonoff, and raising the whole force employed by the two generals in the first attack to twenty battalions, numbering 15,000 men, made a simultaneous but distinct onset. They had formed opposite our right, their left on the Sandbag Battery, their right across the postroad where it enters the Quarry ravine.
Pauloff also repulsed. 145
The four battalions composing the regiment on the right had begun to approach the Barrier, when a wing of the 3Oth, 200 strong, sprang over it, and charged with the bayonet the two leading battalions. A short and very serious conflict ensued — many of our men and officers were shot down ; but the charge proved decisive, and the leading battalions, hurrying back in disorder, carried the two others (of the same regiment) with them, and the whole were swept off the field, some towards Shell Hill, some down the Quarry ravine to the valley.
Finally, it remained to deal with the five battalions still left of the attacking force. Against these advanced the 4ist regiment, under its brigadier, Adams, numbering 525 men. Approaching from the higher ground of the Fore Ridge, the regiment, in extended order, opened fire on the 4000 Russians before it, drove them over the declivities, and from the edge pursued them with its fire till they reached and descended the bank of the Tchernaya.
Thus, in open ground, affording to the defenders none of the defensive advantages, walls, hedges, or enclosures of any kind, which most battlefields have been found to offer, these 15,000 Russians had been repulsed by less than a fourth of their numbers. But, in truth, to say they were repulsed very inadequately expresses what happened to them in the encounter. All the battalions which did not retreat without fighting left the field so shattered and disorganised, and with the loss of so many officers, that they were not again brought into the fight. This was in great measure owing to the density of the formations in which the Russians
146 Causes of Russian Repulses.
moved, and the audacity with which our slender bodies attacked them. Seeing the British come on so confidently, on a front of such extent as no other European troops would, at that time, have formed without very substantial forces behind them, the Russians inferred the existence of large numbers, and remained convinced that they had been forced from the field by masses to which their own were greatly inferior. This was a moral effect ; but there was also a material cause conducing to the result. The Russian riflemen, as we soon had good reason to know, were armed with a weapon quite equal to our Minie; but the mass of the infantry still wielded a musket not superior to the old Brown Bess firelock, which the Minie had replaced, whereas our troops, except those of the Fourth Division, had the rifle. Therefore, long before a Russian column had got near enough to make its fire tell, it began to suffer from a fire that was very destructive, not only because of the longer range and more effective aim, but because the bullets were propelled with a force capable of sending them through more than one man's body. But these reasons are merely palliative ; nothing can veil the fact that, supported by an overwhelming artillery, which frequently reduced ours to silence, these great bodies, once launched on their career, ought by their mere impetus to have everywhere penetrated our line ; and that had even a part been well led, and animated by such a spirit as all nations desire to attribute to their fighting men, they would never have suffered themselves to be stopped and turned by the imaginary enemies
Dannenbergs Attacks. \ 4 7
which the mist might hide, or which the intrepid, gallant, audacious bearing of our single line caused them to believe might be following in support of it.